A Brief History of the Department of Geophysics, 1958-1993

I. INTRODUCTION

It was a dark and stormy night and the villains were seated around
the board room table. And the chief of the villains said to the
sous chef "Antonia, let us create a Department of Geophysics". But
Antonia said "Let us not be too precipitate." (she liked using long
words when a short one would do). "Let us begin by transforming
the Department of Geology into the first Department of Geology and
Geophysics in Canada by adding Robert J. Uffen, a faculty member in
the Department of Physics, to the Geology Department as Head, and
sole member, of a sub-department of Geophysics and with Harold
Reavely as Head of the sub-department of Geology; then after a year
add Alan E. Beck, a PDF in the Department of Physics, to the
sub-department of Geophysics and split the Department of Geology and
Geophysics into two full departments, thus achieving another first
for Canada and Western." (she also liked using long sentences).
The chief said "That is a good idea and since we want Geophysics to
start off mainly as a graduate department, let us give them a
princely initial budget of $16,000 to cover everything including
salaries" And so it came to pass, in July 1958, the year also being the
occasion for a reunion to celebrate the initiation of
the departments.

II. DEVELOPMENT OF THE FACULTY

click to embiggen

A. The first ten years

In 1959 Charles M. Carmichael (Paleomagnetism) became a part-time
lecturer in Geophysics. In the following year Mike Carr (Shock
Wave Physics) and Alan Jessop (Heat Flow) were appointed PDFs.
Then for the 1960/61year the villains got to work again and said
"Let's make Uffen Principal of University College (essentially the
Faculty of Arts and Science) and Beck acting-Head of Geophysics."
But Beck said "Hold on a minute, I don't want the bloody job unless
I can have more people." Since the villains were desperate they
agreed and so it came to pass with Tad Ulrych (Age Determination)
being appointed Lecturer until such time as he completed the
formalities of his Ph.D. degree. Next year Tad Ulrych was
appointed Assistant Professor and H. Currie Palmer (Paleomagnetism)
and Robert F. Mereu (Seismology) came on board as PDFs.

In the meantime, advertising for a real Head of department
proceeded. There were indeed responses, some from quite eminent
people, but they took one look at the acting-Head and decided to
stay where they were. And so it came to pass that in 1963 Beck was
appointed Head of the department "during the pleasure of the Board"
as things were done in those days; nobody seemed to realize that
meant he could be fired without cause at any time. Also in 1963
Mereu was appointed Assistant Professor and Ulrych went on leave of
absence and eventually wound up at UBC; leave of absence meant we
had his salary to spend. At that time the newly created Department
of Applied Mathematics wanted to appoint Douglas E. Smylie but did
not have the salary available until the following year so Smylie
was appointed Assistant Professor of Geophysics pro tem (there was
remarkable cooperation and less administrative bull in those days).

For some obscure reason Geophysics became entitled to a permanent,
more senior, faculty position but argued for a visiting Associate
Professor position on the grounds that as a small department we
would need to be stimulated in areas that were not our main areas
of expertise. Thus, in 1964, Wojtek Domzalski, an exploration
geophysical consultant, became our first visiting Professor, John
H. Sass (Heat Flow), who had obtained his M.Sc. with Beck as
supervisor, came on board as a PDF after obtaining his Ph.D. degree
at the Australian National University. The next year, 1965/66,
Beck went on sabbatical leave, Carmichael was appointed acting-Head,
H. Takahashi (a gamma ray specialist) replaced Domzalski,
Smylie transferred to Applied Mathematics and Mansinha (model
seismology) came in as a visiting lecturer

In the 1966 academic year, U. Aswathanarayana (Geochemistry)
replaced Takahashi, Mansinha and Palmer were appointed assistant
Professors, while Akio Hayatsu came on board as a Research
Associate to look after the K-Ar dating aspects of the
paleomagnetic work and later became a full time faculty member.
The following year Sam Warren Carey, a dynamic tectonics man,
filled the visiting Professor position, Smylie transferred back to
Geophysics, later moving to UBC, and Kegong Shih (Heat Flow) came
for the year as a PDF. In the 1968/69 year Helmut Schloessin was
appointed to undertake the task of developing a High Pressure -
High Temperature (HPHT) laboratory for the determining physical
properties of rocks and minerals at lower crust - upper mantle
conditions.

The year 1988/89 was one of the most important in the history of
the department; it saw our first retirements. Two faculty,
Carmichael and Schloessin, and Y. Ling our highly regarded
instrument maker. We all realized that it was probably the
beginning of the end. In 1990/91 Richard A. Secco was appointed
Assistant Professor to fill the hole left by Schloessin.

On 30 June 1993, the day Beck was to retire, the Department of
Geophysics and the Department of Geology were also retired and
metamorphosed into the Department of Earth Sciences which has since
prospered.

All faculty members were active professionally, serving on (and in
a number of cases chairing) local, institutional, provincial,
national and international committees on education, research policy
and grants selection.

III. DEVELOPMENT OF RESEARCH PROGRAM

The direction of development was to select those areas in which the
University already had some reputation and develop these into the
areas of strength. The areas selected were palaeomagnetism and
geothermics (including the thermal history of the earth). Later
on, it became obvious that seismology was both a popular subject
and an area of considerable significance to Canada; this was
therefore added to the list of areas of concentration.

Out of palaeomagnetism there arose a need for age determinations.
Initially, these were obtained by imposing on groups in other
universities and government departments. The required number of
age determinations became so large it was difficult to persuade
people to cooperate and a small potassium-argon (K-Ar) laboratory
was built to cover this need. These facilities have been used by
people in other departments of the university and other
universities to date various minerals; in addition, some original
work is also being done on K-Ar methods.

Not long after the Department was formed it was realized that
little or nothing was being done in the world, let alone in Canada,
concerning the measurement of physical properties of minerals and
rocks with the simultaneous application of high pressures and
temperatures equivalent to those in the upper mantle and lower
crust (down to depths of 100-200 km), an area increasingly being
labelled Mineral Physics. Because of the great expense involved in
initiating and developing such facilities attempts were first made
to persuade other groups, particularly in government, to undertake
the task. By the mid-1960s, when it became clear that others were
reluctant to undertake a program of this type, the decision was
taken to develop this area as well. Some time was spent finding
the money and a new faculty member to actually run the project.
This particular program had very general implications since it
touched upon all other areas of interest within the Department, as
well as some areas in the Department of Geology. This facility, as
well as the nature of the research carried out with it, is unique
to Canada and one of the few in the world.

One other area had to be covered - Exploration Geophysics.
However, because of the continuing rapid development in this field
it was felt that to appoint a faculty member, presumably from
industry, in this field would not be to the long range advantage of
the departmental objectives since within five years he/she was
likely to become as out of date as the rest of the faculty members
within the Department. This particular field of interest therefore
depends more upon group cooperation than upon an individual. Thus,
the seismologists are responsible for various aspects of
Exploration Seismology, potential field methods the responsibility
of three or four people, etc.

Finally, it was recognized at an early stage that the Department
would necessarily remain small and that some steps should be taken
to ensure that it did not get into a rut. For this reason, on the
first occasion there was a change in faculty, an annual Visiting
Professorship was established whereby senior people (or junior
people for that matter) could come to the University to work and
lecture, for periods up to one year, in areas that were mostly
complementary, rather than identical, to those already covered by
the Department. This development worked well with a broad spectrum
(geophysicists, geochemists, geologists, cosmic ray physicists,
etc.) coming during the seven or eight years of existence of this
position; the position was eliminated in 1974 during an early bout
of cost cutting.

For several years each faculty member of the department held a
National Research Council of Canada (NRC), later the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), research grant
the only department in the Faculty of Science to be in such a
position.

IV. SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE RESEARCH PROGRAM

In retrospect the 1960s to mid 1970s may have been our most
productive years, probably because funding was easier than now and
geophysical research was still relatively young and "discoveries"
therefore also easier to accomplish than now.

It was a time when paleomagnetism had become fashionable and there
was considerable interest in the origin of thermo-remanent reversed
magnetisation observed in some field specimens. Carmichael,
working with Blackett, showed, experimentally, one possibility - a
thermally induced spontaneous magnetic reversal located in
hemo-ilmenite crystals. It was also a time of considerable interest in
the Chandler wobble, not in what it was but in how it was
maintained. Following a paper by Press on the continent wide
redistribution of stress after a major earthquake, Smylie and
Mansinha theorised that redistribution of stress implied a
redistribution of strain and therefore a redistribution of mass;
detailed investigation enabled them to show that observed sudden
changes in the polar wobble path were a consequence, at least in
part, of major earthquakes. Mereu started applying fractal theory
to the interpretation of crustal seismic transects and showed that
much of the fine structure being inferred was in fact imaginary.
Beck, who was postulating that with relatively shallow boreholes
the corrections to heat flow density values for Holocene climate
change were more important than glacial advances and retreats,
realized that those perturbations to the subsurface temperature
profiles could be used to infer past surface temperature
variations.

V. DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS

Although the first Honours B.Sc.s in Geophysics were awarded at the
Spring Convocation of 1959, the end of the first academic year of
the department's existence, this was really achieved by a sleight
of hand. Three students formally enrolled in the Honours Physics
program, but who through the sub-department mechanisms were taking
a non-standard program which included courses in Geology, were
transferred into what was then called the Honours Geophysics
Program (in those days it was much simpler to handle things on an
ad hoc basis - it is doubtful whether anything like that could be
done now). For many years this basic approach was used with the
department essentially acting as a switching mechanism to guide
students who were interested in Geophysics into appropriate courses
in Applied Mathematics, Geology and Physics; there was only one
undergraduate Geophysics course. It was realized that after the
first year it would require the students to take 6, rather the
standard 5, courses a year if they were to cover in reasonable
depth the disciplines of Physics, Mathematics and Geology. This
undoubtedly made it tough on the students but had the benefit of
acting as a filter through which only genuinely interested and
determined students would elect to pass. As can be seen from the
previous section the faculty numbers were rather large for a
department that gave only one course; but they played their part in
undergraduate education by giving courses in the Physics, Applied
Mathematics, Geology and, for a short time, Computer Science
Departments.

In 1966 a major modification to the program was made with the
introduction of several Geophysics courses, including a thesis
course. In this program, later called Honors Geophysics I
(Physical) students took a common first two years with the Physics
Department. In the third and fourth years they continued taking
courses with emphasis in Mathematics and Physics but these were
supplemented with a number of Geology courses.

In 1970, a 3-year B.Sc. program requiring only 5 courses a year was
introduced. Because it was clear that some geology students wanted
the option of taking more quantitative courses an attempt was made
to persuade the Geology Department to introduce an appropriate
program; however, this failed to pass the Geology Council so an
additional Honors Geophysics II (Geology) program was adopted where
the first two years were essentially common with those of Honors
Geology, but with the proviso that the options chosen for the
second year had to be Physics, and Mathematics. There were, of
course, changes over the years, usually minor and usually arising
from changes made in other departments. In addition, other
programs were introduced (Honors Geophysics and Computer Science,
Honors Geophysics and Astronomy) but they proved to be extremely
difficult programs and therefore generally failed to attract enough
attention. Nevertheless, our highest number of program registrants
in the Honors and 3yr programs was over 50.

Although the introduction of a number of Geophysics courses meant
that the faculty now had more undergraduate responsibilities in the
Geophysics area, they continued to give courses in other
departments, although, obviously, the number given was reduced.

In 1980 the Canadian Geoscience Council published a report "The
Geosciences in Canada, 1979. Part 1: Geology and Geophysics in
Canadian Universities" a survey to determine the quality of
undergraduate education at universities across the country. The
Department of Geophysics was ranked top, by companies in the oil
and gas industry, in terms of "providing a very satisfactory
service to the industry".

VI. SOME DEPARTMENTAL HIGH POINTS

Apart from our birth in 1958 and our demise in 1993, three events
stand out. The first was the holding, in 1969, of a NATO Advanced
Study Institute on the Rotation of the Earth, sparked by the
studies of Smylie and Mansinha, which for the first time brought
together Astronomers, Geophysicists and Geodesists to discuss all
aspects of the Chandler Wobble. The second was the hosting of the
21st General Assembly of IASPEI in 1981, during which there was a
mail strike. Attendees were much impressed with how we handled
things, little realizing that mail strikes were a frequent
occurrence in those days and we had much experience in how to
circumvent the inconveniences by taking mail to a US office and
using a post office box there for incoming mail; there are certain
advantages to living close to the US border. The third was the 30 year reunion
in 1988 at which was attended by the three original faculty members and by the first three graduates with an honours standing in Geophysics.